iPad 2 owners – don’t bother upgrading.
Recently a friend offered me £220 for my 11 month old iPad2 so that I could get a new iPad. I was really tempted since that meant that I would only have to find £179.00 to buy a 16GB new iPad. I popped down to my local Apple store to take a look at the awesome retina display and see the performance increase before I parted with my cash.
I was somewhat disappointed to find that the retina display update, whilst an exciting additional feature, was not enough to make a major difference to the user experience.
OK I know my eyes aren’t the best these days after 20 years looking at a computer screen, but you can only really see the difference when using the web browser and zooming in close so that you can see the smoothed fonts.
Battery life
I have now heard that the battery takes 6+ hours to fully charge, that’s more than the iPad2’s 3-4. The new iPad still has a dual core processor, albeit more powerful. The quad core graphics chip seems impressive however.
Retina Bloat
Another problem is that I can see that all apps, especially games, are going to balloon in size due to the graphic assets needed to support the high resolution display. Some are saying that it is now pointless to buy a 16Gb iPad since it won’t take many apps to fill up the memory. The amount of apps that have had retina updates released recently is proving my point.
Here is a table of recent iPad2 and new iPad app sizes:
| App | iPad 2 | New iPad |
| Keynote | 110MB | 327MB |
| Numbers | 104MB | 375MB |
| Pages | 89MB | 331MB |
| iMovie | 82MB | 404MB |
Bring on the ‘new new iPad’
A nice as it would be to have a shiny new iPad I can’t justify spending the money for not much of an upgrade. If they were to have brought Siri out for the iPad then maybe that would have been a different story and maybe they will do later this year when iOS 6 is released in June. Apple will certainly have to add more more servers to the already struggling Siri service.
Looks like the rule of thumb used by iPhone users to upgrade every other release is ringing true for iPad users too. Bring on the iPad 4, or do you think they will call it the ‘new new iPad’ !
